The Carbon Stall: Why Asia’s Building Sector Stopped Moving, and What Regenerative Leadership Is Doing About It

Erin McDade, Senior Program Director with Architecture 2030, conducted this interview. Architecture 2030’s mission is to rapidly transform the built environment from a major emitter of greenhouse gases to a central source of solutions to the climate crisis. For 20 years, the nonprofit has provided leadership and designed actions toward this shift and a healthy future for all.

Over the past decade, the building sector in Asia has adopted zero carbon commitments, updated codes and scaled technical training — and yet the climate momentum has slowed. For Architecture 2030’s Asia team, the impasse pointed not to a gap in knowledge or technology, but to something less tangible: practitioners needed a different relationship to their work, to each other, and to the living systems in which they design.

The Future Positive Regenerative Leadership Program (Future+) grew from that recognition. Co-founded with Wildbound, the program convenes architects, planners, and designers across Asia — not for another technical workshop, but for immersive, place-sourced gatherings that draw on local wisdom and regenerative practice. Future+ asks participants to step back from the mechanics of carbon reduction and sit with bigger questions about purpose, connection and what it actually takes to restart a stalled movement.

Across three inaugural workshops — in Sichuan, China; Kuching, Malaysia; and Bali, Indonesia — each co-designed with local partners and rooted in the particular wisdom of its place, a set of shared principles emerged. Future+ doesn’t transfer knowledge so much as shift the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible: aligning intellect with emotion and embodied experience, reorienting practitioners from relentless doing toward a more conscious state of being, and replacing transactional relationships with reciprocal ones. Rather than arriving as outside experts, facilitators join communities to co-learn and co-create. Instead of importing regenerative frameworks wholesale, the program surfaces what is already present — Taoist and Buddhist teachings in Sichuan, the ethos of gotong royong in Kuching, Bali’s Tri Hita Karana — and builds from there. “I no longer lead with rigid engineering logic,” reflected one engineer who participated in the Kuching and Bali workshops. “I start with experiences and possibilities.”

I spoke with Yaki Wo, Asia Lead & Senior Fellow with Architecture 2030 and co-founder of Future+, about what prompted this shift, what the first workshops revealed, and where the program goes from here.

Future+ Kuching | Image by Jane Chang

Erin McDade: What was the primary catalyst for the Future+ program? 

Yaki Wo: The Future Positive Regenerative Leadership Program (Future+) was co-founded by Architecture 2030 and Wildbound in 2024. It is a program, community, and movement based on living systems principles and frameworks, with a vision of enabling the emergence of regenerative hubs in and across Asia, rooted in local wisdom and practices.

Architecture 2030 has been active in Asia, particularly in China, since 2015, collaborating with key stakeholders on implementing its mission to decarbonize the built environment in response to the global climate crisis.   In support of this mission, stakeholders across China adopted zero-carbon commitments and building codes, and developed technical trainings to scale impact. Over time, the general perception of “zero carbon” in China shifted from skepticism to imperative, with the Chinese government announcing a carbon neutrality goal in 2022. After nearly a decade, however, the effectiveness of the strategies adopted to mobilize the building sector appeared to have plateaued. Everybody knew we had to get to zero, but not much was actually happening; progress felt stagnant. So we started asking, how do we revitalize this movement?

Unable to host any in-person gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Architecture 2030 Asia team took time and space to engage in deep reflection. And we were not alone –  the world started looking inwards and asking the big question: why are we humans here on Earth? What is our purpose and role? In China, the real estate crisis saw multiple companies go bankrupt. Many experienced architects were laid off, and young ones were not able to find jobs. They were looking for a new direction.

I saw the connection between the climate and ecological crises and people’s inner crises. After my mother’s passing, I studied the systems view of life with Fritjof Capra, trained as a certified relational nature and forest therapy guide, and participated in Regenesis’ Regenerative Practitioner Series. Fascinated by the non-linear complexity of systems and experiencing a profound sense of awe when reconnecting with nature, I knew the time was ripe for engaging architects in deep, lasting transformation. After many conversations with Wildbound’s Songqiao Yao, Future+ was born, underpinned by the premises that shifting our state of being and thinking is the first and most important step to meaningful change, and that in times of polycrisis/metacrisis, stepping back from individual technical solutions and working at a systems level is necessary.

Future+ Bali | Photo by Dodik Cahyendra

The program heavily emphasizes “regenerative design.” How is this principle operationalized within the Future+ framework? Is there a specific set of criteria or a toolkit that defines what “regenerative” means for a participating city?

There is no single, agreed-upon definition of regeneration. The foundational premise is that our planet is living and life is constantly evolving. To be regenerative means to embrace diversity, uncertainty, and flexibility. A project or a place is always becoming and can always be on a journey of regeneration. In contrast, standards and criteria are often static, black and white, all or nothing.

“The essence of architecture is an art of existence, one that needs to be experienced through the body and multiple senses rather than judged by a singular visual standard.”
—Cihang Wang, architect, participant in all three workshops

We can explain regeneration simply as co-evolution. We are nested, interconnected systems co-evolving to a higher, more complex order of life, not in conjunction with nature but as part of nature. This co-evolution is enabled by knowing and living in our innate potential. Underlying this notion is a set of living systems principles that prompt our shift from the mechanistic mindset of “I think therefore I am”, to “we relate therefore we are.” When we remember our natural roots and reconnect deeply with our more-than-human relatives, our daily work transforms.

Instead of command-and-control, we recognize the innate potential of every living being and support their emergence as co-creators. Instead of rigid plans, we embrace flow and uncertainty, sensing and responding in real-time. Instead of working 80 hours per week and striving for constant productivity, we follow the rhythms and cycles of nature to create and rest. Instead of maximizing profits via monoculture, we celebrate the flourishing of diverse lifeforms.

As architects and planners, instead of treating nature as a resource and imposing our human-centric ideas onto the earth, we practice listening to the land, finding its essence through layers of visible and subtle patterns _ geological, hydrological, ecological, cultural and otherwise — sensing what it is yearning to become and facilitating that process of becoming.

Future+ Kuching | Image by Jane Chang

How do you anticipate the program evolving after the initial Future+ workshops conclude? What mechanisms for long-term stewardship are built-in?

As Future+ transitions to its next phase, we are guided by two imperatives: Community development and thought leadership. Developing a regenerative knowledge system rooted in Asian tradition, culture and wisdom, and cultivating leaders and practitioners who are well-versed in this knowledge system.

Rather than having a fixed plan, the core team finds itself asking many questions, such as:

• How do we identify the nodal interventions to focus on during this phase that could help unlock the potential of our community members AND the community as a whole, in service to the greater Asia regenerative community?
• How do we tap into the potential of the Future+ community to be co-creators, co-implementers and co-holders of this program, community, and movement – while also supporting everyone to do what they love?

In our most recent gathering, we offered these questions and initiated meaningful conversations with the Future+ community. Many members came together to create working groups on specific topics, and the core team initiated a co-holding group – a small group of dedicated members committed to collectively exploring key topics such as regenerative organizational structure, decision-making processes and resource allocation mechanisms. We will collectively practice sensing and responding (as nature does!) while this journey unfolds.

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Top image: Future+ Sichuan | Photos by Kun Kun

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